It’s always a good day when the beloved Jane Jacobs gets mentioned in the news. The writer and urban observer has been getting her much deserved revival recently via a lush graphic novel and even an opera chronicling her legendary toppling of development dictator Robert Moses.

Jacobs also hated the damage wrought by cars and auto-centric infrastructure – and she adored the bicycle as an equitable mode of transport. That’s where today’s urbanists are correct to emulate her. Tearing down human-scaled historic buildings to make room for parking lots was an aberration that can’t be fixed fast enough. But when it’s a matter of tearing down the old purely to increase ‘density‘ (the current coded buzzword for moremoney), today’s Jacobs’ fans have no problem turning their back on her.

They forget Jacobs was a critic of capital, knowing that short-term profiteering by developers and city governments destroy the very creative neighborhoods artists and musicians rely on to live. She knew that by not investing in its own labor force that homelessness would increase, that it is the working class that makes cities thrive.

Suffering decades of economic blight, stocked with a hundred thousand vacant buildings, and a police force with bigger problems on their hands, Detroit has become known worldwide as a street artist’s paradise. As the city depopulated, more walls became available for murals, tags, wheat pasting, stuffed animals, you name it.

Often misunderstood as a signifier of blight, Detroit’s graffiti, like all graffiti is more a reaction to it. There is a fundamental human need to make art, to mark territory, to write messages to one another on walls. Street art is in fact an indicator of a healthy community – a community speaking to itself, in public, in the commons. It is the last surviving classic art movement, a pure act of tactical urbanism long before the term existed.

Detroit’s so-called rebirth narrative is drenched in billionaire cash, framed by developer public relations branding. It is a marketing pitch that profits from the grit and soul of Detroit’s illegal street art while those with money aim to eradicate as much unsanctioned artwork as possible, lest the nervous new tourists start fidgeting.